https://youtu.be/6MaUpCsCnTg
en français
[Podcast in French / English subtitles available on the video]
— a conference recorded at Les Champs Libres (Rennes, Brittany) in December 2023 in the framework of the serie "What stories for our time", moderated by Nicolás Buenaventura - writer-director and storyteller - and Yann Apperry - screenwriter, playwright and novelist.
How do fictions affect our lives, and what fictions can we hold on to? How can stories guide our steps, imbue our bodies?With Aurélie Valat - scriptwriter (France/Greece), Nancy Murzilli - philosopher and literary theorist (France) and David Le Breton - anthropologist and sociologist (France) as well as Hubert Allignol - Head of the Personal Offences Department, Rennes Police Headquarters and Valérie Le Dorven - Head of the Minors' Brigade, Rennes Police Headquarters
Nancy Murzilli
A shared narrative.Over and above artistic fiction, for some time now I've been interested in all those ways of producing fiction that nourish reality and transform it - what I call our ordinary fictions. These are the fictions that we constantly produce on a daily basis to project our future, to experiment - whether it's playing with our children, the way we talk to our dead, our imaginary friends, going to see a fortune teller who will draw the tarot for us...Re-capacitating our collective creation to produce narratives.My idea is to re-encapacitate a faculty that we all share, which is that of producing narratives and which is not the privilege of artists. To build on this shared critical capacity and trust the audience-readers to continue the initial work.Co-construction and co-responsibility for the story.Entering into a real conversation between the person who produces and the spectator/reader who receives, with his or her imagination.Reformulate for an original story.When we start by talking to a fortune teller or tarot reader, we come up with a question that we rephrase and we draw cards at random. And that's when a story begins to emerge that tells us something about ourselves - through the intermediary of the cards, which are arranged randomly because they are drawn at random. It could be about the past, the present or the future. It's a story with real drama and real tension. The predictive and divinatory narrative.Dramatic tension transforms our lives. From artistic fictions, from a film or a book, we make connections with our own experience. This can be described as the predictive and divinatory nature of fiction.Fiction acts but we cannot anticipate how. Because it escapes us, from the moment we deliver it. The spectators/readers then take hold of it - personally - by pursuing this fiction that they adapt to their own lives. Responsibility for the story.The responsibility that every scriptwriter/author has is to know that the fiction is going to escape them because it is going to be shared. The scriptwriter/author is not in control. They do not have the ability to pull all the strings, but to weave the starting point for a story that will continue and be constructed outside their control.The story as a succession of risks.Writing is a constant risk-taking exercise, even more so when you publish a book or make a film: being confronted with the risk of the absence of the spectator-reader, of the support of the producer-publisher.We are always on the razor's edge as authors. And as humans, in our daily lives: every choice is a risk. Deciding to study in Rennes or Nantes means, in a way, changing your life completely, because you may meet someone new in love, friendship or work.
Depositing the story.
